Mapping Agents to Agent Groups

I have a number of applications that have between 40 - 50 very fine-grained processes running in each application. These processes are grouped so one set of functions runs on a Linux box, another set that run on an AIX Frame, and a third set that also run on Linux. We have muliple environments (qa, perf, preprod, and prod), so managing the agent names and groups is something we are working through.

Currently, our agent names include application-specific stuff and the environment name as a suffix (i.e. -qa, -prod, -dev). This poses some challenges to our release engineering activities, so we are looking for additional options.

Is there a way to specify multiple host names or, ideally, reference a host group as part of the agent group configuration. If we could, then we could let the machine names be the filter that determines which environment a particular process (agent name) matches, and hence the right profile. Because of the size of our infrastructure environment, there is no pattern to our machine names or IP addresses that can leverage.

3 Replies

There is no way to use a host group for agent mapping purposes; of course you can use create more than one mapping per agent group to map agents from a list of hosts into one agent group - using only one host per mapping.

As an alternative I would think about changing the Agent name systematic, e.g. simply start all Agent names with the desired System Profile and AgentGroup and than map them with "starts with".

If neither approach is working for you please send me an example list that contains hostnames, agentnames, desired agent group for a more detailed discussion.

The machines that the services are on may be something like xxx01dev, xxx05qa, xxx07dev, etc. There is no pattern on the host names. We could create the same agent entry multiple times, once for each host, but it would be easier to specify a hostgroup or list of hosts with the specific agent.

Maybe a dumb question: Why do you need to specify the host name at all, the agent name doesn't look ambiguous?

Answer by
James M.·
Nov 01, 2011 at 08:52 PM

Sorry for the lag; I've been out for the last couple of weeks.

The names above a very specific; we would like to try and simplify them a bit to eliminate the environment aspect (i.e. the suffix called SIT, for system integration test). To do that, we need to specify the list of machines that make up the SIT environment; a single machine reference doesn't work and regexp could be rather complicated to pull off because there's no pattern to the machine names.